Twitch suspends DragonForce guitarist for playing his own music

Authored by happymag.tv and submitted by tcnewstream
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Twitch continues its DMCA takedown rampage, this time suspending the channel of DragonForce guitarist Herman Li for playing his own music.

Twitch has recently been busy with its comically oversized takedown hammer, smashing thousands of channels for their unsanctioned use of copyrighted music under the auspices of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Now, its wrath has been seemingly misapplied to a well known artist, guitarist Herman Li of DragonForce, who has shifted his streaming activities over to the band’s YouTube channel.

My Twitch channel is currently suspended. Today I will be streaming on YouTube instead athttps://t.co/BKSH6bI73W

Starts 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 8pm UK.

Another new guitar incoming today! pic.twitter.com/kjwZn8L08i — Herman Li (@HermanLi) October 27, 2020

Li has been major supporter of music streaming on Twitch, going so far as to give fellow streamers blanket permission to reproduce anything from DragonForce’s Maximum Overload, Reaching Into Infinity, and Extreme Power Metal albums without fear of DMCA-fuelled repercussions.

Li himself is (or was) a frequent Twitch streamer, where he could often be found shredding on his guitar, playing games, and chatting with fellow musicians, among other things.

While Twitch has not revealed any official reason for the suspension of Li’s channel, plenty of industry commentators have naturally suspected that it has fallen victim to the merciless automated DMCA takedown system, which offers creators no means of disputing or appealing bans to save their content.

If even a well known and respected streamer such as Li can fall victim to the machinations of the copyright robots, it’d only be natural for any other streamer to fear for the safety of their channel, and in the case of professionals, their livelihood.

Mcpoyles_milk on October 29th, 2020 at 08:02 UTC »

Matt Heafy from Trivium got his channel muted playing his music on his channel too

thatpj on October 29th, 2020 at 06:07 UTC »

twitch is getting weird

RedbloodJarvey on October 29th, 2020 at 05:31 UTC »

Did someone make a claim, or does twitch just have a bot taking down anything with music?